PayPal teams with ET searchers to create interplanetary payment system

It's apparently no joke. But will UPS deliver packages to Mars?

Let it never be said that PayPal's leadership team confines its ambitions to Earth. PayPal founder Elon Musk, who also created SpaceX, says he wants to live the final days of his life on Mars. But who wants to go to space if you can't buy stuff? That's why PayPal is now talking about how to create a payment system that can be used on any planet.

It's apparently not a joke. PayPal President David Marcus wrote a blog post yesterday about the launch of "PayPal Galactic" (that link doesn't work yet), an initiative developed in concert with the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). An announcement will be made today at the SETI Institute with moon traveler Buzz Aldrin and John Spencer, founder and president of the Space Tourism Society. To show he's serious, Marcus tweeted a picture of himself with Aldrin.

PayPal says its wants to answer these questions:

What will our standard currency look like in a truly cash-free interplanetary society?

How will the banking systems have to adapt?

How will risk and fraud management systems need to evolve?

What regulations will we have to conform with?

How will our customer support need to develop?

Why start now? "Space travel is opening up for 'the rest of us' thanks to Virgin Galactic, Space X and a host of other space tourism programs including the Space Hotel that hopes to be in orbit by 2016," Marcus wrote. "The enabling infrastructure pieces are starting to come together, and as we start planning to inhabit other planets, the practical realities of life still need to be addressed."

The need for a payment system off Earth already exists, he contended, writing that "[a]stronauts inhabiting space stations today still need to pay for life’s necessities—from their bills back on Earth to their entertainment, like music and e-books, while in space."

That problem has already been solved, however. Astronauts on the International Space Station have had access to the Internet and World Wide Web "via the ultimate wireless connection" since January 2010. As long as the Internet can expand throughout space, there's no reason Internet-based payment systems can't as well. Latency from one part of the galaxy to another might make things difficult, however. Where will the bank or other central authority be located, and how can it validate transactions from payers light-minutes or light-hours away?

And if we ever meet aliens and have to come up with an inter-species payment system—that might get tricky for completely different reasons.

Promoted Comments

All joking aside, that question arguably touches on why PayPal's 'experiment' is kind of silly.

Because space introduces higher-than-sky-high ping times, as well as intermittent line of sight and other nuisances, the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems has been doing actual work for a touch over 30 years on the issues of data transmission and networking under those conditions.

Once you have a data link, though, "OMG, Payments in SPACE" is basically just 'payments over a really lousy internet connection'. Not a solved problem, in any elegant sense; but one that has plenty of ugly-but-functional solutions(and one that I wouldn't exactly want Paypal within a mile of having input into...)

"We deeply regret being unable to deliver your parcel. The deliverer was hit with lethal amount of radiation, turned into a Hulk-like creature, and promptly destroyed everything on board along with the ship. We will inform you by space-snail mail whether you will receive a refund for your package or not. Thanks for being a valuable customer of UPS!"

Despite their end goals, it seems like a lot of their intended research is still relevant here and now. Rethinking banking and currencies certainly seems to be a bit overdue, so why stop at a global rethinking?

All joking aside, that question arguably touches on why PayPal's 'experiment' is kind of silly.

Because space introduces higher-than-sky-high ping times, as well as intermittent line of sight and other nuisances, the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems has been doing actual work for a touch over 30 years on the issues of data transmission and networking under those conditions.

Once you have a data link, though, "OMG, Payments in SPACE" is basically just 'payments over a really lousy internet connection'. Not a solved problem, in any elegant sense; but one that has plenty of ugly-but-functional solutions(and one that I wouldn't exactly want Paypal within a mile of having input into...)

I am a galactic prince from Tau Ceti V. I recently have been expelled from my collective and need move quickly my vast wealth to your planetary system. Your email identity became aware to me and if so you could help me just forward your genetic code for verification ...

Reminds me a sci-fi short story I read many years ago. Can't remember the title or the author, but it was an interesting take on interstellar travel.

Guy was working in the mailroom and noticed that packages from across town were taking a week to arrive. Then he looks at packages from other states that took only 5 days. Packages from Europe were taking 3 days. So he has one of the light bulb moments and he addresses a package to Mars. Gets the package back the next day with a Mars postmark. Then he addresses one to another star system and between the time he puts it outside and turns around to go back inside the package is back.

"The time has now come for us to start planning for the future; a future where we aren’t just talking about global payments. Today, we are expanding our vision off Earth into space."

I guess the Bit Coin and other folks aren't in the running for a non-nationalized currency. And I can't even fathom how much Paypal will want to charge as a "service charge" for processing off planet transactions.

"How will our customer support need to develop?"Judging from the current customer support systems on Earth, the customer support for space transactions will fall burning into the sun...though only ~after~ charging customers mandatory fees for service.

Can anyone just imagine trying to get Paypal to refund a payment overcharge that occurred during a space vacation. ?

"We are sorry but you will have to return go to the location where the payment was originally processed and file ten paper forms with the business which was involved. Then have that business mail those forms back to our off-planet review site for our arbitration board to decide whether we want to refund your space currency. In the mean time we will put a hold on all of your space currency accounts and terrestrial bank accounts to protect Paypal from fraud until our investigation is completed. Have a nice day and night. Thank you for contacting Paypal with your concerns."

Will the standard currency be backed by something tangible like gold to set an exchange rate or it will be backed by hot air like most of the world's currencies?

Gold's only backed by hot air: It's quite possibly the least useful naturally-occurring metal in existence. It only has value because people agree it has value...rather like fiat currencies, no? Further, the gold standard means that governments can't manage their economies at all (see how well that's worked out for Greece and Spain, which would both benefit immensely from not being on the Euro right now) and a "pure" gold standard would be ludicrously prone to clipping and shaving, while any hybrid standard gives you the worst of both worlds.

Plus, gold is *heavy*, any interstellar currency would have to be massless simply because lifting a chunk of gold into orbit (or, even worse, to another planet) would cost more than the value of that gold in rocket fuel.

Will the standard currency be backed by something tangible like gold to set an exchange rate or it will be backed by hot air like most of the world's currencies?

Given the mostly-theoretical utility of holding currency 'backed' by a rather heavily element stuck at the bottom of a gravity well several light-minutes away, I'd expect not. If people are excessively concerned by the inflationary risks of fiat currencies, We Have The Math to keep issuance known and finite with a trickle of bandwidth, rather than a lot of shipping(or probably-unwarranted trust in whoever guards the vault and pinkie-swears that no more currency has been issued than gold in the vault can cover). If we aren't particularly concerned about that inflationary potential, we may even skip much of the math.

Gold is actually pretty handy stuff. The major problem is that(because of the craze for putting perfectly good chunks of it, refined to high purity no less, in permanent storage) the price it commands from people who want to do nothing with it is higher than its value for many industrial/technical applications.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don't get paid?Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.

So, really, all we have here is "PayPall and SETI want to set up a think tank to dream up possible issues with processing financial transactions over very long distances".

We've already confronted issues like this, and managed ways to deal with them. Think of the information transmission latency of 100 years ago, or even 50, yet we still managed to make an international banking system work, even if not as sophisticated as it is today.

"delivered." (meanwhile your electronics, rather than sitting intact on the surface of mars, are spread out in a thin layer of fragments at the bottom of a 10m crater on Io...assuming UPS works there the way they do around here.)

Reminds me a sci-fi short story I read many years ago. Can't remember the title or the author, but it was an interesting take on interstellar travel.

Guy was working in the mailroom and noticed that packages from across town were taking a week to arrive. Then he looks at packages from other states that took only 5 days. Packages from Europe were taking 3 days. So he has one of the light bulb moments and he addresses a package to Mars. Gets the package back the next day with a Mars postmark. Then he addresses one to another star system and between the time he puts it outside and turns around to go back inside the package is back.

I remember that story, now that you mention it. I'll have to see if I can find it in one of my books.

This is absolutely outregous. Now not only can ET phone home he can get a job and send all the money there too.

Thanks to this "achievement" there is now nothing stopping streams of illegal aliens entering our solar system, sneaking through the Asteroid belt, then taking our jobs and paypal-ing the money back home.

My fellor Ars-ians, we must put a stop to this at once. We must all commit to the building of a giant space fence just outside the orbit of Mars. Only with this can we ensure that our children, and our childrens children, can live in a human society with human jobs.